Jonathan Coulton Kickstarts ‘The Princess Who Saved Herself’ Into an Illustrated Book

Art: Takeshi Miyazawa, Colors: Jessica Kholinne

Last month, comic book writer Greg Pak and musician Jonathan Coulton launched a Kickstarter to turn Coulton’s songs into an epic crossover comic called Code Monkey Save World; the project blew through its original goal of $39,000 within 12 hours and is currently over $215,000.

The lyrics tell the tale of an unnamed princess who faces down all sorts of fairy-tale problems, but rather than waiting for someone to come to her rescue, solves the problems her own way. By the end of it — spoiler warning! — she not only befriends a dragon and a formerly evil witch, but she ends up forming a band that plays “mostly math rock and cuddle core” where she rocks out on lead guitar.

Pak, who’s been wanting to do a children’s book for a while, describes the song as “an anthem for tough, fun little girls who love princesses but aren’t sitting around waiting to be saved. The world is full of these amazing girls who may be wearing the pretty pink skirt, but they’re wearing scuffed up jeans underneath it and they’re out there rockin’ and rollin’.”

For Coulton, the reason for the song (and the potential book version) are a little more personal. “My daughter went through a princess phase, like most girls, and it was a little terrifying to watch her biological programming get hijacked by this manipulative industry that made tiny-waisted dolls based on outdated female role models,” said Coulton.

‘Little girls are pretty kick-ass, and for anyone who has spent some serious time watching them figure out the world, assigning them to some passive role brushing their hair in a high tower will seem a little ridiculous.’

— Jonathan Coulton

“Little girls are pretty kick-ass, and for anyone who has spent some serious time watching them figure out the world, assigning them to some passive role brushing their hair in a high tower will seem a little ridiculous. This song was an attempt to describe and enable that kind of kickassitude, and so putting it into kids book form is another one of those no-brainer ideas. It is totally off topic from Code Monkey, but it feels like a great bonus — like buying a set of Ginzu knives and getting a citrus juicer in the bargain.”

If the Kickstarter meets the next goal of $250,000, The Princess Who Saved Herself will be provided as a 24 to 28-page book for every who contributed at the $15 level and higher, written by Pak with at least 20 illustrations by artist Takeshi Miyazawa. It seems pretty likely that it will, too: In just over 20 days, Coulton and Pak have racked up over five times their initial goal at a rate so rapid that they once met a stretch goal before they announced it.

With over $200,000 in pledges already, they’ve been able to double the size of the Code Monkey comic to 96 pages, add an additional story based on another of Coulton’s songs by the Action Philosophers creative team of Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey, and get Coulton back in the studio for an acoustic album of the songs that inspired the comic. With all that already accomplished, getting enough to throw in a brand-new all-ages book seems pretty likely.

According to Pak, there was never a question about adding more and more to the project in response to the overwhelming support from fans that made it financially possible:

“We’ve all worked on stuff for much less than we’re worth because we love it and it’s important to us and because we’re helping friends out. As we’re coming up, we do a lot of stuff with friends for nothing, because that’s how we come up in the world. At a certain point, particularly when you’re working on bigger projects that take longer, I’m not comfortable asking people to work for free. Artists can only work on one thing at a time when they’re doing a comic book, it’s incredibly hard to do something else, and they have to eat. They have to feed their families, and the fact that we’re able to pay people what they’re worth on an independent project is something that I’m really happy about, and grateful to all these backers for. They’ve given us the ability to do that. ”

As for the future, Pak and Coulton have already started discussing what they might do after this project has wrapped. Pak has even mentioned considering the possibility of a Code Monkey ongoing series, expanding on the work he’s doing of building a shared universe out of Coulton’s music. With the success of the initial Kickstarter, something else seems inevitable, but whether it’ll be crowd-funded or not remains to be seen.

“We’re learning,” says Pak. We’re still figuring this out. What we are trying to do, though, is use this opportunity while this thing is still cooking to make sure that this project is as good as it can possibly be, and ensure that everyone buying into it is getting a heck of a payout. “